“The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.” Elizabeth Hardwick

#BookReview The Crossover Year by Bhargavi Balachandran

05Mar

When I first read the blurb of this book I connected because somewhere it felt closer to the life I am living hence it intrigued me. Thankfully did i enjoy reading this book and ended up having a good time, surprising? yes because I am not a big fan of Indian writing.

Anuprabha is in her late twenties and works in bank. She needs a daily fix of Calvin and Hobbs (hey me too! :D) She is married to Mukund for four years, so they quarrel and make up just as easily and theirs is an arranged marriage. There there is Smrithi, her best friend, who works in the same bank. This is a story of Anuprabha and her life and for once she does not have a fancy name but a name that a regular name, dont know why but to me that added a normalcy to the story as opposed to a protagonist called Pia would have.

Unhappy about her life and wanting to discover herself she has attempted to quit her life but never successfully. Until an opportunity crops up and she makes most of it. On her time away from work she watches Raakkesh Kumar on TV and makes a plan to get her life back on track. She does what most women will do, join a gym and goes shopping. In an attempt to be normal this book after a point felt rather jaded to me! It was too mundane for words. I wish the spark lasted till the end. But what worked for the book was that it was written in first person so you felt as if someone was talking to you.